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A screaming comes across the Internet…

It just occurred to me that my daily output at Raw Story would make for a damn fine Pynchon novel:

Pro-choice satanists align with bare-breasted anti-gun advocates and a liberal pope against a cabal of baby-penis-sucking Orthodox Jews controlled by a blowhard television personality calling his followers to “rise up” against an abortion clinic where no abortions are performed — all while a cat walks around with guacamole on his head.

I don’t know about you — but I’d read that.

RELATEDLY: Every time I hear the host of the Diane Rehm Show, I’m convinced she’s a Pynchon pun come to life.

SEK’s New Internet Film School column: How the politics of Snowpiercer don’t matter if you’re an idiot anyway

Here you go. Sample:

Much praise has been showered upon the unsubtle English-language debut of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer, but the most interesting came from an unexpected source, conservative columnist Michael Potemra, who wrote that “the film succeeds aesthetically and as pure entertainment” despite the fact that “it’s a pretty heavy-handed Marxist allegory.” Convincing your ideological opponent that your “heavy-handed” slagging of their belief system is an exceptional work of art is quite the feat. Imagine convincing the grandchild of someone who survived a concentration camp that Leni Riefenstahl brilliantly captured the pain of the German people when she had Hitler lay a wreath on the Great War memorial in Triumph Of The Will. Not going to happen.

But that is precisely what a student of film should be able to do—divorce content from form, and remove both from the historical context, in order to understand how a piece works. Which is not to say that Potemra is a student of film, because despite his praise for the “aesthetic” of Snowpiercer, he also claims that “the train is an excellent set, a realized world that manages, amazingly, to avoid claustrophobia.” Potemra seemingly prefers to remember the more well-lit second half of the film to the painfully claustrophobic opening scenes. The latter half of the film, after all, concerns the tortured choices the capitalist elite must make in order for humanity to survive—a theme much more to the liking of someone who writes for the National Review…

UPDATE: If only I’d known that Jonah would publish his review the same day I did mine!

In his defense, I don’t think he understood it was an insult

This has to be parody, right?

I make words with my mouth on the Internet. What more do you want from me?

Erstwhile conspiracy-monger Alex Jones is basing his new conspiracy theory on…something Joan Rivers said.

I’m increasingly convinced that those conservatives who claim Jones is a “false flag” might be onto something, because I’ve seen my share of “Michael Obama” and “First Tranny” jokes over the last six years, but I’ve never seen them directly connected to a United Nations plot to turn us all into “biological androids” who live “to serve the state.”

Steven Soderbergh and the real measure of humanity

Being that I’m the kind of person who has his own film school and what-not, I decided to read Esquire’s interview with the now-not-but-soon-to-be-again-retired Stephen Soderbergh. “Could be edifying,” I thought to myself — and it was, especially this passage:

A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That’s a deal-breaker for me. If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter — I’m out. That’s a core problem. You’re being mean to someone who’s helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

Because it’s a funny story, but in the ’90s I actually waited on Steven Soderbergh quite a bit, and if that’s his litmus test, he didn’t pass it. Not even remotely.

Because as memory serves, when Soderbergh was a regular at the used bookstore/coffee shop I worked at, his treatment of me then would’ve been a deal-breaker for him now.

One particularly memorable conversation involved his then-obsession with Ambrose Bierce. I’d placed the special orders for the books myself, so I knew they’d just come in the week before Mr. Ambrose Bierce Expert saw me reading Mason & Dixon behind the counter. He proceeded to excitedly tell me, at length and with some volume, that I was wasting my time reading Thomas Pynchon, because Ambrose Bierce was where it’s really at.

He went on and on and on, enthralled by his own love of Bierce — which, after I became an Americanist and read him, I believe is totally justifiable. But the point is, Soderbergh wouldn’t just have failed his own criterion for the measure of humanity, he would have done so spectacularly.

Which, as a friend on Facebook noted, might be the point. He might have chosen his worst character trait as the defining characteristic of humanity because it’s something he had to overcome, and given the depth of charity to the underprivileged and unvoiced evident in his work, I’m tempted to believe that.

Because as much as I despised him as a patron when I had to deal with him, I can’t help but admire — however begrudgingly — what he’s done with himself in the years since, especially Che.

I know I’m defending the film against an idiot of an ideologue at that link, but even if I had to defend it against Roger Ebert himself, I’d do so with the same vehemence…

…despite how I feel about the man personally. He’s just that talented, damn it. There’s a real humanity to his late-period work, especially in the films that everyone hated because they dealt with unsavory subjects like prostitutes or viral pandemics or Che.

So on behalf of all the baristas and book-store employees he berated before he came to understand this truth as being self-evident, I’m just going to go ahead and forgive him.

You’re welcome, Steven.

The 300 Best Guided By Voices Songs: #300 “Not Behind the Fighter Jet”

Some of you may believe that I chose this song as the 300th best of the 983 Guided By Voices songs in my collection simply because I’m pandering to Farley … and you’d be partially correct. This song is both great and has fighter jets in it, as you can hear for yourself below:

More importantly, it’s a moving — if sloppily done — adaptation of William Butler Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” which is a poem, and a good one at that. Granted, it lacks the chiasmatic magic of the original and the First World War context, but other than that, it’s about fighter jets, which the Yeats poem is also about.

In all seriousness, though, the two lack any connection other than their fatal airiness, but what makes Robert Pollard’s lyric here so moving here is the contrast between the grandiosity of faux-narrative and its narrator.

A wounded mercenary bleeds,
In the hall of fantastically fine things.
Where the path of glory leads,
Lately, I think it’s grown too hard.

As I’ll say countless times, no doubt, depending on how long I pretend to be doing 300 of these, I do believe Pollard tossed this lyric off.

He went big when he was half in the bag, probably, with tales of mercenaries and their fine halls, but sobered up, pulled back, and admitted that even lying about his exploits proved too hard. Which, admit it, is what humanizes this track in the first place.

“The rich are different from you and me.”

But they’re certainly not better, if #richkidsofinstagram is any indication:

“Yes, I’d like some buffalo wings, raw, and $255 cut of steak, completely ruined, slave.”

Via SEK via Other Scott via Facebook:

This must be posted on RIGHT NOW as insulting plutocrats who want their expensive beef turned into shoe leather is an LGM tradition going back to Duke Cunningham…

SEK’s new AV Club Internet Film School column: On the importance of contiguity in Orange Is the New Black

My new column is up! And the title of it references a beloved Internet Tradition!

Sample:

What had, minutes earlier, been an audition for the role of “child” in a production of “family” has transformed into one for the role of “cog” in “drug enterprise.” The confusion created by placing these scenes back-to-back will resonate throughout the season, as Taystee must decide whether Vee is a caring mother figure or an exacting boss. Initially, at least, she seems to understand the difference—but as the episode progresses, the amount of emotional energy she invests in acquiring a job becomes increasingly excessive, making the stitching of these two scenes together seem increasingly meaningful.

Cheese dreams are made of these

Last night, I dreamt I’d become a sensation on the Texas rabbinical circuit. I went from makeshift Texas synagogue to makeshift Texas synagogue — they refuse to build real synagogues in Texas, after all, so Jews there celebrate the Sabbath in sweltering temporary shelters — and all I did was call God a dick and invite people to argue otherwise. Because they were Jewish, they mightily obliged.

I blamed God for killing beloved pets and parents and the like, and people responded that He made Israel possible, that we wouldn’t be here without Him. I would say, “No, that’s Hitler you’re thinking of,” and they’d be even more upset. It was great fun.

Eventually, because it’s Texas, someone tried to assassinate me — Me! The most popular itinerant rabbi in Texas! — and my last thought was, “I hope they name some shit sinkhole of a kibbutz after me.”

Point being, that sharp horseradish cheddar I ate right before I went to bed last night? I’m absolutely doing that again.

Feel free to share the dream of yours most likely to be adapted by the Coen brothers in the comments. If you’re at a loss, I recommend eating some cheese and grabbing a nap.

SEK’s final Game of Thrones recap until next May is now up

You’ll have to wait another nine months for my next recap, so savor this one!